Do you have a preferred key to produce in?

I feel like this is a really basic thing but it never seems to get addressed.

I remember doing an early track in C and I made this awesome sub bassline at C1 that sounded fine on my monitors.

I sent it off to get mastered and the engineer rolled off the low frequencies starting at about 30hz, which is pretty standard I guess to stop the sub bass sucking all the energy out of the speakers. (I think this is because most sound systems people have at home and car stereos can't handle much below 30Hz without distorting, correct me if I'm wrong about this)

In my noobness I didn't realize that C1 is about 33 Hz, so any notes below that were pretty much wiped out.

Anyone else encountered this, or take key into consideration before starting a track? If so do you find any particular key better than others for bass heavy music?

I used to do all my track in D, which is around 37 HZ. Because my monitors aren't very good I used to really struggle to get it to sound decent. Now I mainly do my tunes in G# but use different scales. I like using the D dim blues scale and starting with G#.

When I started producing I heard that ''F is the sweetspot for sub''. So I basically only worked around that key for a year or so lol. But now I favor G or G#. I rarely use C - E for my root keys tho. I think it is because I've gotten used to how the sub and midrange behave at the higher keys… it just sounds ''right'' to me when I work in F - A# somewhere.

Thanks for the info.
I've been using E as the root key for a while now just cos I thought it gave me enough leeway to drop lower without getting into that 30hz or less range.
If I start using the black keys does that make me a proper musician?

harmonic amn scale is a charm, especially for the sad sweet melodies and deep dark basses... and such an easy and just great scale

Click to expand...

I normally use D or D# natural or harmonic scale (depending on how dark I want the track to be). But, if I recall it right, I've done one song with two scales, one major and one minor, and the contrast between the two were pretty interesting.

Yeah bassmusic is weird about keys: in any other genre it really makes no difference what key things are in (apart from major or minor obviously).

The only thing is about getting bass that's low enough to be powerful but not so low as to be inaudible.
Check out frequencies of musical notes and compare to frequency response of speakers.

E1 is 41 Hz and E2 is obviously 82 Hz. For maximum impact, I would keep the root note below A1 (55Hz)

Also bear in mind that you can have more creativity if you give yourself a little room to go 2st below your root note. It means that your bass riffs can be more interesting because you have the option of going up or down.